“I am planning to play at this point, but I haven’t decided and the coaching staff hasn’t made that final decision yet”.
“I’m going to vacation with my family over the next couple of weeks”, Wambach said.
Abby Wambach’s phone kept buzzing over and over Wednesday morning and the United States soccer star had no idea why. “I’m planning on playing next summer in Rio, but I gotta let my body recover”. Seven games is a lot of games [at the World Cup], and it wasn’t a long period of time we were playing over.
The tweet removed some context, Wambach said.
Global soccer’s all-time leading scorer has confirmed she plans to go for her third gold medal next summer in Brazil. Considering the Reign play on artificial turf and don’t really have any prospects for getting a grass pitch, the chances of Wambach ever playing here only seem to have diminished from “unlikely” to “almost certainly never”. She has not closed the door on trying for her fifth Olympic team. Now we’ll have to see whether she should make the team, and whether they will. It was the U.S.’ first Women’s World Cup title since 1999.
The Americans, who won their first World Cup since 1999, kick off a 10-city celebration tour on August. 16 in Pittsburgh.
All four forwards from the 2012 Olympic team (Alex Morgan, Sydney Leroux, Amy Rodriguez and Wambach) were on the United States team that won the 2015 Federation Internationale de Football Association Women’s World Cup earlier this month. Her role in this summer’s World Cup in Canada changed from starter to backup, causing more speculation that she might hang up her cleats. Frankly, it’s not even clear if she’d be much more than another weapon of Laura Harvey’s bench even if she did sign.
Wambach sounds ready to just relax for a while. Finally. But what’s next for her?